A coalition of Hollywood filmmakers, executives, and actors has spent three years meeting privately with Silicon Valley leaders to define where AI fits into a human-controlled creative process. The group, convened in November 2023 by LucasFilm pioneer Kathleen Kennedy and American Film Institute dean Susan Ruskin, published its first public framework last week after a meeting of about 120 participants in Los Angeles.
The document, called "Human Generative Workflows," is intended to "stimulate industry discussion and provide a common vocabulary for thinking about authorship in an era of generative AI," the group said in its first public statement. Attendees included actor Ben Affleck, A24 partner Scott Belsky, CAA agent Greg Siegel, and director Jon Avnet, according to Page Six Hollywood.
The initiative comes as the entertainment industry wrestles with how generative AI can support filmmaking without displacing the human labor at the center of it. Concerns range from how models are trained on creative work to the rise of AI-generated deepfakes that replicate actors' likenesses without consent.
Defining what counts as AI-assisted work
The framework argues that the term "AI" is too broad to be useful in industry conversations. It is "used in the same breath to mean a color grading assist in DaVinci Resolve and a prompted synthetic performance that replaces an actor," the group wrote. The coalition is pushing for a classification system that distinguishes between these very different uses.
Many tools already embedded in production workflows use machine learning and are producing copyrightable work, the group said. The framework lists examples such as "upscaling and sharpening" and "markerless mocap" as AI-assisted processes that serve a human creative vision rather than replacing it.
The key distinction, the group says, comes down to whether a tool substitutes for human creative work. AI-generated assets such as voices and likenesses fall into that category - and those are not copyrightable, according to the framework. "The difference between a set of tools and processes that serve human creative vision and a prompt-based generative tool that replaces it" is the line the coalition is drawing.
What the framework doesn't address
The group acknowledged that the document was not designed to resolve some of the more contentious issues around AI, including how models are trained and the potential impact on jobs. Instead, the framework is meant to give the industry a shared language for talking about authorship as generative tools become more common.
"This conversation is bigger than AI," the group said. "It is about bringing the entertainment community together to shape a shared approach to the future of the creative process."
The coalition hopes the published framework will provoke discussion beyond film - including among musicians, sound designers, and writers - about how artists can consent to and be compensated for the use of their likenesses in generative systems. For creatives navigating these questions, the stakes are practical: where the line falls between tool and replacement determines who owns what they make.
Why this matters for creatives
For working filmmakers, writers, and artists, the framework offers a concrete way to talk about AI tools without collapsing every use case into one vague category. That language matters in contract negotiations, credit disputes, and copyright claims.
The group's position that AI-generated voices and likenesses are not copyrightable - while AI-assisted tools like upscaling and motion capture are - gives creatives a starting point for arguing where their own work ends and a machine's begins. The conversation is far from settled, but the coalition's willingness to publish its thinking signals that Hollywood is moving from fear toward definition. Creatives who understand AI for Creatives workflows will be better positioned to shape those definitions before someone else writes them.
The framework also points to a gap that remains: consent and compensation for artists whose work trains or informs generative systems. The group flagged this as an open question, and it is likely to be the next battleground as generative video tools become more common in production pipelines. The document's authors said it best: "The future of entertainment will be shaped not by AI alone, but by the choices we make about how AI is integrated into the creative process."
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